ivy, district twelve ; fin

Twins.

It's like they share the same soul, tethered together by an unyielding binding agent, couldn't let go even if they tried. They're carbon copies of one another, mirrored reflections, a perfect facsimile.

Ivy and Arwen were like that, once.

Years ago, when their mother's heart still rapped against her chest, a warmth still encompassing her thin frame. They were kids back then, with round cherub faces, a rosy tinge to their cheeks, and seemingly, no care in the world. And like most twins,  they were inseparable, conjoined tightly at the hip, like an invisible rope was wound around them. You would never find one without the other.

Although Ivy was the louder and more amicable one of the two, Arwen was the shot-caller. He said it was because he was taller ("It's not even an inch!") and older ("Nuh uh!"), but truthfully, Ivy was perfectly fine with settling for the backseat, at being the sidekick while he took the role of superhero. She just liked having somebody glued to her side, even when he yelled at her, pushing her away and calling her annoying just for tugging at his sleeve.

He's such a boy, she'd say to herself, rolling her eyes. Sunshine girl, bright-eyed with a heart of gold. Always the optimist. A smile never fell from her face, people joked and said that she smiled so much that her mouth got stuck like that, permanently. Arwen despised that. Told her to wipe that muck off her stupid face, that they were growing and she needed to act like it. Ivy would just scrunch her eyebrows and dramatically fold her arms over her chest, jut out her bottom lip and say something half-witted in her best impression of her aunt, monotonous and mechanical, before collapsing to the ground in a fit of giggles.

Growing up was never an option for her.

Even when her mother died - dug her own grave and buried herself in it, Ivy remained the same radiant, sunflower-hearted girl after the fallout. It was the world, her world, all around her that morphed into something else. The sun dimmed and the nights became longer, people got sicker and an empty, glacial cavern took the place of the thing beating inside their chest. Alive, but not. A ghost in the shell of a person, living and breathing, but still hollow.

Arwen became like that.

Numb to everything and everyone. Numb to the way skin and flesh squish when a needle threads through it. Numb to death itself. Ivy understood that, told herself it was just his coping mechanism and that the Hospital helped with that, kept his mind busy, and focused on his work. You needed that in the Mortuus line of work. But time went on and it became increasingly noticeable that something changed, that a part of him got lost in the after.

He used to yell at her when she walked into his room, shoving his finger into the "Do Not Disturb" sign on his door and saying, "Can't you read?" Ivy ignored it on purpose, though, sprawled herself out on his bed, her head hanging upside down against the mattress frame. She'd tell him about her day, about all the little things she saw that made her heart lighten, and he'd sit there and listen, visibly vexed. But now, he doesn't say anything. He looks at her and she searches his eyes, but there's nothing. Just a dark, endless void that has eaten him whole and left him empty.

It scares her sometimes.

Ivy thinks that she could've saved him, that she should've. She should've been at his side in the basement, in the cold staring at a corpse laying on a steel table, their chest opened for you to see all their insides. She should've been in the same sterilized, blue scrubs and annoyed him more than ever, just to keep him how he was. But her stomach disagrees with the copper smell of blood and the sight of it makes her sick. So she makes the deliveries instead, bringing the red-tape tagged boxes from the Hospital to their beneficiaries, all while carrying a smile on her face. It's who she was. And truthfully, she's happy to play her part, to not be a burden under those bright surgical lights. Happy to be a singular cog in the machine, even if she rather it'd be double.